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Showing posts from April, 2024

Fedora 40


Fedora 40 is now out, the most current release that I personally use on my own Talos II and Blackbird systems. (This means that Fedora 38 will go EOL in about a month.) This release is presently based on kernel 6.8.7 and GNOME 46, but not the anticipated new Anaconda installer and DNF5 package manager updates. Also included are gcc 14.0, GNU binutils 2.41, glibc 2.39, gdb 14.1, Golang 1.22, LLVM 18, Ruby 3.3 and PHP 8.3.

Perhaps the biggest news for this release is that an official Chromium build is available once again for ppc64le while I still spin my wheels with the Firefox JIT (Wasm is now broken again and I have not been able to figure out why). I don't like Chromium for philosophical reasons but I'm sure it will make many of you happy.

That said, this release is probably more notorious for eliminating X11 support in the KDE Plasma 6 spin, which yours truly also uses. It will be interesting to see how well that works on the GPU-less Blackbird here since I haven't seen anything to suggest the issue with 1920x1080 through the onboard HDMI has been fixed, but the trusty old BTO WX7100 in the T2 should be fine in the Wayland Wasteland. Attempts to remove the X11 session from GNOME reportedly didn't land for this release either, so we'll see how that turns out too. I usually give the repos a few days to catch up before updating and then I'll post my usual mini-review (here's the one for F39).

OpenBSD 7.5


OpenBSD 7.5 is out with multiple kernel and SMP improvements (we love SMP improvements on our multicore beasts), more hardware support, and LibreSSL 3.9.0, OpenSSH 9.6/9.7, and LLVM-clang 16.0.6. The only headliner Power ISA specific improvement to the big-endian powerpc64 port is a smoother upgrade process, but all the other advancements are welcome too. Download from any of the many mirror sites.